## Facts

- Residents on Loretta Otero’s postal route in Los Lunas, New Mexico reported missing mail, including credit-card-related items, and some experienced unauthorized account activity.
- A postal inspector investigated and placed two test letters resembling credit card mail on Otero’s route during surveillance.
- The inspector observed that the test letters were not delivered and stopped Otero after her route, finding the two test letters and additional undelivered First-Class credit-card-related mail in her possession.
- Investigators later sought a search warrant for Otero’s residence and computer to locate evidence of mail theft and related fraud.
- A magistrate judge issued a warrant authorizing a search of the residence and computer using broadly worded authority that permitted seizure of “any and all information and/or data” on the computer.
- Agents seized and searched the computer, discovering incriminating documents, including a typed list containing personal identifying information.

## Issues

1. Whether the computer-search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement by effectively authorizing a general search of all data on the computer.
2. If the warrant was invalid, whether the exclusionary rule required suppression or whether the Leon good-faith exception applied.

## Decision

- The Tenth Circuit held the warrant was invalid for lack of particularity because it did not sufficiently limit the computer search to evidence of specific crimes or defined categories of files.
- The court nevertheless held the Leon good-faith exception applied because officers reasonably relied on a magistrate-issued warrant.
- The court reversed the district court’s suppression order and remanded.

## Legal Principles

- The Fourth Amendment requires warrants to particularly describe the place to be searched and the items to be seized; this constraint applies with full force to digital searches.
- A warrant authorizing seizure of “any and all” computer data, without meaningful limits tied to suspected offenses or specific categories of evidence, is overbroad and lacks particularity.
- Under United States v. Leon, evidence obtained under an invalid warrant may be admitted when officers act in objectively reasonable reliance on a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate, unless the warrant is so facially deficient or the process so compromised that reliance is unreasonable.
- Good faith may be supported where officers seek prosecutorial guidance, obtain judicial authorization, and conduct a search directed at locating evidence of the suspected offenses rather than a generalized rummaging.

## Conclusion

The Tenth Circuit found the computer warrant unconstitutional for overbreadth but ruled that suppression was not warranted because investigators acted in objectively reasonable reliance on the magistrate-issued warrant, bringing the search within the Leon good-faith exception.


United States v. Otero, 563 F.3d 1127 (10th Cir. 2009)